Conclusion

Because many immigrants to the United States, especially Mexicans and Central
Americans, are young men who arrive with very low levels of formal education,
popular stereotypes and standard criminological theory tend to associate them
with higher rates of crime and incarceration. The fact that many of these
immigrants enter the country through unauthorized channels or overstay their
visas often is framed as an assault against the “rule of law,” thereby
reinforcing the impression that immigration and criminality are linked. This
association has flourished in a post-9/11 climate of fear and ignorance where
terrorism and undocumented immigration often are mentioned in the same
breath.

But anecdotal impression cannot substitute for scientific evidence. In fact,
data from the census and other sources show that for every ethnic group,
without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for
immigrants, even those who are the least educated and the least acculturated.
This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who
make up the bulk of the undocumented population. What is more, these patterns
have been observed consistently over the last three decennial censuses, a
period that spans the current era of mass immigration and mass imprisonment,
and recall similar national-level findings reported by three major government
commissions during the first three decades of the 20th century.

Given the cumulative weight of this evidence, immigration is arguably one of
the reasons that crime rates have dropped in the United States over the past
decade and a half. Indeed, a further implication of this evidence is that if
immigrants suddenly disappeared and the country became immigrant-free (and
illegal-immigrant free), crime rates would likely increase. The
problem of crime and incarceration in the United States is not “caused” or even
aggravated by immigrants, regardless of their legal status. But the
misperception that the opposite is true persists among policymakers, the media,
and the general public, thereby impoverishing a genuine understanding—a
situation that undermines the development of reasoned public responses to both
crime and immigration.

Endnotes

1
See Ramiro Martínez, Jr. and Abel Valenzuela, Jr., eds., Immigration and
Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence. New York: New York University
Press, 2006.

2
Rubén G. Rumbaut and Richard D. Alba, “Perceptions of Group Size and Group
Position in ‘Multi-Ethnic United States.’” Presented at the annual meeting of
the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, August 2003. See also Richard
D. Alba, Rubén G. Rumbaut and Karen Marotz, “A Distorted Nation: Perceptions of
Racial/Ethnic Group Sizes and Attitudes toward Immigrants and Other
Minorities,” Social Forces 84(2), December 2005: 899-917.

7
As used in this report, “legal” immigrants consist of Legal Permanent Residents
(LPRs)—about 40 percent of whom had been in the United States in other statuses
(including temporary or unauthorized) before becoming LPRs—as well as LPRs who
subsequently became naturalized U.S. citizens. “Illegal” immigrants are those
who entered the country without proper authorization, or who entered the
country lawfully with non-immigrant visas but subsequently over-stayed or
violated the terms of their visas. Visa over-stayers and violators may make up
as much as 40 percent of the illegal immigrant population (See Jeffrey S.
Passel, The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population
in the U.S.: Estimates Based on the March 2005 Current Population Survey.
Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, March 7, 2006, p. 16).

8
Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on the
Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 2000 (Population
Division Working Paper No. 81). Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, February
2006, Table 1.

9
These figures are weighted estimates drawn from the March 2006 Current
Population Survey (CPS).

10
Jeffrey S. Passel, The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant
Population in the U.S., March 7, 2006, pp. 2, 5, 7.

23
Data from the 5% Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the 2000 Census are
here used to measure the institutionalization rates of immigrants and natives,
focusing on males 18 to 39, among whom the vast majority of the
institutionalized are in correctional facilities. For a description of the
methodology used to produce estimates of the incarcerated population from
census data, see Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, Recent
Immigrants: Unexpected Implications for Crime and Incarceration (Working
Paper 6067). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 1997.

24
Census Bureau data are not available on the specific ethnicities of
native-born, non-Hispanic whites and blacks. Therefore, comparisons of the
native-born and foreign-born by ethnic group are possible only for Hispanics
and non-Hispanic Asians.

25
Data on education for these foreign-born populations are drawn from the 2000
Census, 5% PUMS. See also Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant
America: A Portrait, 3rd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006.

29
Robert J. Sampson, Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Stephen Raudenbush, “Social Anatomy
of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence,” American Journal of Public
Health 95(2), February 2005: 224-232. See also Eyal Press, “Do immigrants
Make Us Safer?,” The New York Times Magazine, December 3, 2006.